As soon as the New York Times first hit us with its paywall back in 2011, industrious little news fiends all over the internet began looking for ways to get around it — and it didn’t take long. One of the simplest holes simply required you to delete a few characters at the end of the URL. Well, those glory days are over.
A full two years later, The Times is finally addressing the loophole. Apparently, Joe Coscarelli at New York Magazine was the first to notice that deleting the characters no longer offered free access, and he was eventually apple to confirm with a Times rep:
When we launched our digital subscription plan we knew there were loopholes to access our content beyond the allotted number of articles each month. We have made some adjustments and will continue to make adjustments to optimise the gateway by implementing technical security solutions to prohibit abuse and protect the value of our content.
Of course, there are most definitely other ways to circumvent the newspaper’s subscription fee (clearing your cache, for instance), but this move is just another sign that the days of free, unlimited content are winding down. [New York Magazine via Mashable]